Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)
Fantaisie pour flûte n°1-12

Tommaso Rossi, flûte à bec

"A design with arpeggios which moves into a brief passage of descending thirds and then an ascending scale. This brief cell, with a clearly improvised feeling, opens the first of the twelve fantasias that Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) published in Hamburg in 1732. It is a collection with extraordinary importance in the repertory for the solo instrument in the first half of the eighteenth century. More than Solo pour la Flûte traversière by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1013), written between 1722 and 1723, the model which seems to inspire Telemann seems to be the series of preludes that Jean-Jacques Hotteterre published in the collection L’Art de Préuder (1719), a series of brief flute compositions in all keys, in the style of a prelude. However, we immediately realise that, compared with Hotteterre, Telemann has approached solo writing with a very different complexity in composition and with a commitment in terms of variety of forms and absolutely unique ability for synthesis between absolutely different genres. In fact, in Telemann’s writing, the improvisational idea is only one of the ways to compose which tends to condense, into the brief duration of each fantasia, a notable series of musical codes and forms, continuously ranging between the models of the French suite and the sonata in the Italian style. In this connection we must note as many as seven movements in the fugue style, exactly as in the Italian sonata". Tommaso Rossi